• 0 Posts
  • 246 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

help-circle




  • I wanted to participate in some Matrix groups, so hosted Conduit. Synapse was out of the question because it is too heavy for my cheap VPS. Some of the groups were encrypted, and my messages there were consistently rendered unreadable! Whether this was a Conduit vs. Synapse or matrix.org vs. everyone else I don’t know, but the result is thw group being rendered unusable.

    But my biggest problem is easily the storage, as Conduit offers no way to clean it up and my disk space is really small. The mandatory “everyone stores everything” model is so weird and seemingly unneeded for a chat… Why isn’t it optional at least??

    Seriously, why is Synapse - the only fully-functional implementation - so damn heavy? Even the developers admit it doesn’t scale, introducing a different commercial version for big deployments! (wonder if this was the plan all along lol)






  • In this case, I think it matters that you can selfhost a server under your control. And to potentially have redundant servers. Maybe even disabling federation to be sure the big ones don’t get the metadata.

    Also while the court ordrs have shown that Signal doesn’t collect much metadata now, it does not mean it is not capable of it - which is what matters in a life-threatening situation. Like, all the traffic goes through a single point - there is still trust involved.






  • Molly also has some quality-of-life improvements - such as allowing to enter a device pairing link manually instead of scanning a QR code (thus allowing use in a VM for registration without a smartphone), or being able to use a generic Socks proxy instead of Signal’s own solution. Not only does that allow running Signal over Tor without using Orbot as a “VPN”, but is also more versatile (I wouldn’t want to set up a separate proxy just for Signal, and also their implementation is apparently inferior to some advanced obfuscation solutions).

    P.S. Also idk if this has been fixed, but Signal’s app bugged out during registration and got stuck on “no google services” warning on my Graphene device, yet Molly went through flawlessly.




  • Yeah, I get your point. I just was pointing out that iPhone users would want to install some messenger for Android family members anyway - so that they don’t get charged per each little message (although I’ve heard that unlimited SMS is common in the US), and have normal-quality media. Or you mean that they’d be still reluctant to install one more app, while the one they already use is bad, like Whatsapp? If we’re trusting proprietary software anyway - why trust iMessage over Whatsapp?

    Also I doubt a Huawei that cost $100 new would be traded for any iPhone anywhere, lol



  • Ah, you mean $100 just for you and then everyone in your family would be able to use it? Still a very steep price but at least you’re not forcing anyone else to pay it. I just thought about messaging not just between family members and you, but between other family members as well.

    Edit: just realized what else I wanted to say. It’s that the iPhone users are used to havung to install separate apps from iMessage anyway - for their friends and family members not on Apple.